Tuesday, December 13, 2016

The Russians Ate This Blog

Hola Everybody,
I had written a whole blog justifying the widespread panic regarding the
allegations that the Russians hijacked the presidential election.
Unfortunately, a three-legged dog stole it, so you’re getting the following
instead.

The Russians are Coming!

(Or: How I Stopped Thinking and Came to Love the CIA*)

No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his
accomplices.-- Edward R. Murrow

Have you no sense of decency, sir?-- Joseph N. Welch to Sen. Joseph
McCarthy

There’s been a lot of hysteria
emerging from the recent and unproven allegations that the Russians hacked our democracy
with the intention of skewing the election in favor of Donald “Le Grand Orange”
Trump. Proof you ask? Well, maybe you didn’t ask as you rushed out the door
looking for the nearest nuclear bomb shelter, but the proof, as aWashington Post article alleges, lies
in some secret CIA document (“assessment”) presented to legislators in recent
days. Mind you, the anonymous sources cited in the article aren’t the ones who
did the assessment, but are unnamed sources guessing at what the people who did
the assessment were thinking!

If you think that’s weird, consider
that leading the war cry are recalcitrant Hillary Clinton supporters (“pragmatic
liberals”) who didn’t have a word to say when credible evidence (i.e., not a “secret
document”) was provided regarding the thieving during the Democratic primaries that
saw the DNC going in the tank for Hillary. If you doubt the veracity of the
evidence in that instance, consider that top-level democratic operatives were forced to resign once the evidence
came to the surface.

But back the WashPo article. Glenn
Greenwald does a great take down of that particular hit piece masquerading as
journalism here.
Essentially Greenwald decries the irresponsibility of accusing a nuclear-armed
power of directly and deliberately interfering in the U.S. election in order to
help decide the winning candidate without any credible evidence. This is how wars
are started -- or have we forgotten the Iraq war yet? The CIA is an
organization dedicated to propaganda and professional lying. They brought us COINTELPRO (the
documented campaign to sabotage the Civil Rights Movement) and Contra-Crack Cocaine. It gave us Pinochet in Chile, and the overthrow of freely elected leaders the world over,
and we’re to take their word based on a “secret document”?

So to sum it up: politicians,
gullible people (aka pragmatic progressives), and the corporate press are now
in high dudgeon over an allegation based on no evidence. Not even a smoking gun.

Still, the election has been hijacked. However, the culprits likely weren’t the Russians but U.S.
conservatives on both sides of the aisle. As previously noted, the DNC and news outlets were in cahoots against Bernie Sanders during the
primaries. In fact, during one 16-hour period, the Washington Post managed to publish 16 negative
Bernie Sanders stories. This is the same paper, by the way, that recently published
an article decrying “fake news.” The irony is that the Post had to “append” that article after discovering their anonymous
sources were flaky, to say the least. Hence, the same paper that used cowardly anonymous
sources to besmirch legitimate news sources, itself trades in fake news. I can’t
make this fuckin’ shit up, people.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have
refused to take leadership in forcing a recount in states that show
suspiciously skewed statistics. The real election culprit has been a Jim Crow-like
attempt to disenfranchise Black voters and other voters of color. In the mean time,
while the aforementioned pragmatic progressives waste their time whining about
Russians, they have completely missed the essence of the problem. In the blackest
city in the nation, Detroit, 87 vote machines broke on Election Day. That’s 59 percent of the voting
machines there. Considering that Trump won Michigan by the tiniest of margins, you
would think that the Democrats would be showing some leadership on this travesty.
Actually, they are nowhere to be seen. The lone voice in the wild here is the
Green Party’s Jill Stein. However, she’s probably run into a brick wall: Michigan
officials passed a state law that says any time a vote counting
machine breaks and causes it to display a different vote total than the one in
the precinct log books, those votes legally can’tbe recounted.

That’s a New New Jim Crow --
clearly a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. So “cousin Pookie” (a racist stereotype
our current neoliberal president loves using to beat other black people over
the head) did vote, but his vote didn’t
count. Add to that the millions of Pookies who have lost their right to vote
due to felony disenfranchisement, the millions of votes lost due to the racist and
criminal practice of crosschecking,
and right there alone you have the stealing of an election. There’s no need to
go to Sarah Palin’s front porch to peer at Russia, the crimes are being
committed here, on our soil. As Jill Stein points out, if you live in a rich
white suburb, you have nothing to worry about. However, if you live in a multicultural
urban enclave the chances of your vote being invalidated grows exponentially.

And that’s just the tip of the
iceberg. The same factors that skewed Detroit are played out throughout the country. We have an electoral system that’s antiquated, undemocratic, and
racist. The least of our worries should
be the Russians, or any outside entity. The enemy is within. All this let’s-kick-Russia-in-the-ass-rah-rah without a shred of evidence is pure insanity and eerily reminiscent of the lead-up to the Iraq war. Same con job.

If the CIA has credible and verifiable
evidence that the Russian government conspired to have Trump ascend the seat of
the most powerful office in the known universe, then by all means, publish
it! Obama needs to declassify that assessment and throw it out there
for public consumption. But (fuck!)
let’s also look at the ways conservatives -- both Democrat and Republican --
game the system to invalidate votes and skew the results in their favor.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed
reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by
sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter,
or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE
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calling it like I see it.

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My life experiences have led me to strive to help others move their lives in a positive direction, exploring opportunities that would otherwise be closed to them. I like to think I sit at the crossroads of the dialectic between knowledge and action. I hope that what transpires here is reflective of my beliefs.